"My daughter's middle-school track coach has decided to punish the entire group of 140 kids with excessive "bear crawling" anytime someone doesn't perform or behave exactly as she thinks they should. Using exercise as punishment, and punishing all for the behavior of one, seems counter-productive. The coach told me, "There is not a coach in America that doesn’t use some type of physical consequence as an incentive to do things correctly. Not in any sport." My daughter is new to extracurricular sports. Is this coach's claim true? Please tell me this isn't so!"
Response by Wayne Parro, Senior Coaching Consultant, Coaching Association of Canada
Please let me start by saying: “Using exercise as punishment, and punishing all for the behavior of one, IS counter-productive.” And, it is not true that “[t]here is not a coach in America [or Canada] that doesn’t use some type of physical consequence as an incentive to do things correctly. Not in any sport.”
When athletes under-perform, the coach’s responsibility is to identify what needs to change and create training/practice conditions to improve the athlete’s performance. If there are discipline issues with an athlete, then obviously corrective measures need to be taken, but these actions must be specific to the athlete(s) and the behaviour. For example, if the coach of a 13-year-old program has a rule that states athletes must be at the training or competition site a certain time before the start of the event, or they will have to do some form of physical punishment, or miss a portion of the competition, where is the justice for the athlete if the reason they were late was out of their control? Children do not drive themselves to training or competition, they rely on their parents and sometimes life happens!
When examining whether coaches should use physical training as punishment, the answer is also rooted in common sense. Physical training is a key foundation of athletic performance and athletes need to be mentally prepared to be pushed beyond their comfort zone. If coaches use training as punishment, this impacts athlete’s mental and emotional state and they view physical training as a negative part of sport. This will likely, over time, inhibit an athlete’s ability to perform at their optimum level.
Logically, athletes that generally do not create situations that put the rest of the team in the position of having to do physical training as punishment, begin to resent the athletes that do create these situations. The culture of the team becomes very negative and overall performance is decreased significantly. The use of physical training as punishment “… causes an athlete physical pain, discomfort or humiliation …”. See this excellent article posted on the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport website, here.
Competitive athletes need to be pushed beyond their comfort zone in order to achieve athletic excellence. The coach needs to carefully calculate when and how to push athletes in training in order to get their best performances in competition. Using physical training as punishment confuses this process and creates a negative relationship between the coach and the athlete.
